Some quetchup with your spam?

In the past few days I've gotten a couple invites to some sort of new social network called Quetchup, even some from people I didn't even recognize. Let's call this Odd Thing #1. But I'm a sucker for social networks (it is, after all, my job to study them) so I went ahead and clicked a link to "join Rowyn and his friends today". Never mind that Rowyn is, in fact, a woman. Odd Thing #2.

Signing up is a three-step process. On the first step, they ask you to choose a screen name, along with your first and last name. Don't worry, though, your first and last name "will not be visible" and "will be kept strictly confidential". (So what exactly do they need them for?) Odd Thing #3. Call me a Facebook (or Friendster) snob, but this is one of the most infuriating things about MySpace: not being able to find people you know in real life because people hide behind cutesy screen names. They also wouldn't let me sign up until I told them how I heard about Quetchup, which was a little odd since I just clicked through a mammoth URL purportedly from Rowyn. Odd Thing #4.

But the piece de resistance here, and the reason I caution anyone who wants to try out this site, is that Step 2 of the process demands your login for one of the Webmail services, and informs you that by providing this you give consent for them to invite everyone in your address book. Odd thing #5. Since Gmail adds every single person you ever replied to to your address book, this ain't so hot. This scores Quetchup a special place in the circle of hell previously reserved for Plaxo and Facebook apps that automatically "notify" your friends. I supplied an old hotmail account that surely didn't have anyone to spam.

And finally, when it was all said and done, I wasn't even Rowyn's friend. Odd Thing #6. I went through all that to sign up, and she still had to explicitly approve me as a friend. (Perhaps this is because she didn't explicitly ask Quetchup to spam me in the first place.)

And even when I did become her friend, I couldn't see her name. So now I have an account on a social network with one friend. I'm afraid to let it scan a list of people I've emailed to see who else is on the site because it'll spam them all. I can't search for anyone by name because names are "confidential". It's like MySpace without the personality.

Which is too bad because they have some interesting ideas ported over from Friendster, like letting you see your second-degree friends (friends of friends), who may well be your actual friends in real life. Facebook still has yet to do this, even though people who many of your friends know on the site may actually know you in real life. And no app developer can do this either, since it's against the Facebook developer terms of service.